Does Wenger even have full financial control over the club? or that just something the WOB say to back up their arguments. I was fairly certain Gazidis and Díck Law handled transfer fees

No, I'm pretty sure there have been many statements to suggest that Wenger's power stretches beyond that of a 'typical' manager.

comment by ▲ Penguin ▲ - Suarez would destroy my £20 Giroud top scorer bet (U13630)

posted 19 minutes ago

TBH even though it's late it's still a bit premature to start getting angry and making outlandish statements, a signing could come randomly out of no-where tomorrow like the Monreal or Eduardo deals.

Geoff was first to break Monreal signing.

Isn't Amy Lawrence a big arsenal fan????

Eduardo deal didn't come out of nowhere

comment by kneerash-23 Cara Gold (U6876)

posted 2 minutes ago

Isn't Amy Lawrence a big arsenal fan????

Yeah but she is a

She's decent on the guardian podcast respected She knows her stuff and is articulate, she certainly knows her club very well

kneerash-23 Cara Gold (U6876)
--------------------------------------------------
A few on here know the club inside out, it doesn't mean they aren't complete tools whos opinions are immediately invalid.

AHB - agree fully with your idea: let Wenger pick players, but someone else handle the negotiations. Isn't this the sort of thing that David Dein used to do? Either way, things haven't been the same since he left.

Why is she a ?

You're walking down a slippery slope if you let someone else negotiate, might I remind you of the clusterphuck of an appointment of damien comolli.....

In my mind, getting dalglish to tell comolli who he wanted was like submitting 5 prices for a job, and getting the bottom 3 out of 5 choices or some random 3 selection from the list. At least if your manager is doing it he'll prioritise what/who he is going for and not settle for andy facking carrol!!!

OP, one question (as I didn't hear what Amy said)?

What exactly did she say about the supposed rift for you to be so confident to go

from this

"Amy Lawrence has indicated on fivelive that there is tension between Gazidis and the board and Wenger over transfers. "

to this

"Here we have a manager who is allowed ultimate control over our finances and the problem is that he WON'T spend."

I don't see how the two bits connect, sorry.

We can surely have our suspicions, but the problem is, no one really knows. So unless she stated something like that very clearly, it's just guesswork by you or anyone else of us. A "rift about transfers" can be many things, and not necessarily that AW would not spend.

Apologies if she explicitly stated that AW was the one being tight w/ the money.

But still wouldn't this be a little absurd. How can a manager have a degree of control so high that he can overrule what the board and the CEO wants in terms of direction for the club.

Goodness. Did he actually leave because he posted an article and people didn't agree with it?

Basically the situation is Arsenal haven't signed anyone and the journal are jumping at the chance to create a huge headline out of the situation. The OP swallows it as gospel because it tends to agree with his idea of what is happening at the club.

To dismiss Amy Lawrence as bitter is pretty short sighted. She's a top journalist and has many contacts within Arsenal. She's amongst David Ornstein as one of the most reliable Arsenal reporters.

However, there's something fundamentally wrong with this latest news of a rift. Mind you, it's not the first time Lawrence has reported a spending rift. I just find it a bit odd that she should come out with this statement a few days after we made a £40m bid for a player, just under 3 times our highest transfer bid.

There could be something in this story. For example Wenger might not think Suarez is worth £50m, and the board are still willing to spend that amount. Maybe the board want a headless spending of players, and instead Wenger wants a careful consideration of the exact type of players we need and how they fit into his system.

But like Kamran said, if you gave Wenger £100m to spend, i doubt he'll hand it back.

I think this is old news, I heard similar a couple of months back. I can see AW moaning about transfer fees and he has always made it known that he prefers to develop and make world class players rather than buy them, so there mat be some truth.

However, Gazidiz telling the whole world that we have money to spend now firmly places the ball in AW's court. It seems clear that the message is to spend. Here's hoping we do. AW is not stupid, and surely he even knows that the time has now come for us to eat our cake at the head table.

Yes it makes so much sense for Wenger not to spend because? However it can't be Gazidis, after all his bonuses are just dependent on increasing profit! More bonus spend less!

Amy has been fed a bum steer by Gazidis again for f/cking up in the market. So obvious after first saying we have £70m to spend. What was the point in that?

Think abt it instead of taking things on face value.

Now it's undeniable that Wenger is the reason we spend so little, it's not even up for dispute any more.

---

Uh-huh. Really?

comment by Arsene Wengers Wife. (U5865) posted 10 hours, 38 minutes ago
kneerash-23 Cara Gold (U6876)
--------------------------------------------------
A few on here know the club inside out, it doesn't mean they aren't complete tools whos opinions are immediately invalid.


This is true but no one on here is a reputable journalist working for arguably the best football writers paper in the UK in the Guardian and no one on here has any links to anyone at Arsenal.

Amy's next headline, 'Wenger linked to PSG'.

And of course PSG only require their managers to spend £150m a year.

As jenius, Kamran, march and others have suggested, it makes absolutely no sense for Wenger to just turn down these reported war chests that the board is supposedly demanding that he spends.

Wenger does not negotiate the transfers of the club; that was the role of David Dein (who then left because he tried to get outside investment, seeing that Wenger wouldn't be able to compete in the ever-inflating football bubble without it...), then Edelman, then Friar, and now Gazidis and co.

A football manager's reputation is based largely on his on-pitch success, so it would be completely absurd for a club to hand over the reins to their manager (principal-agent problem, anyone?), particularly when they don't have any expertise in the field of negotiation (and no, being an economist doesn't make Wenger skilled in the art of negotiating football transfers; I've just got my degree in Economics, and I'm saddened to say that I feel no more qualified in football transfer dealings than when I began my degree ). It's even less likely for a club like Arsenal to hand over such responsibility, given the bung scandal they had with Graham.

All of the evidence, aside from the soundbites we have from the board (whose interest it is in to appear ambitious), suggests that Wenger has not received sufficient support financially, and yet still people intransigently believe that Wenger just loves being needlessly frugal for no apparent reason.

Yes it makes so much sense for Wenger not to spend because?
===========
If you look back at some of Wenger's earliest comments (and by early, I mean the embryonic stages of his Arsenal career), there a few quotes attributed to him which might provide an answer to this question.

In 'The Professor' by Myles Palmer (which I highly recommend), you'll find instances where Wenger says his dream is to have a squad of 60-70% homegrown players.

Growing our own players was a necessity because of the stadium debt, of course it was - but those earlier quotes would suggest that it wasn't the punishment for Wenger that people tried to claim.

With that in mind, I don't think it took much to sell him on the idea of creating his own squad from scratch. And having gone through so much to complete this dream project, it logically follows that he wouldn't want to give up on it without a fight.

Why you taking this Amy woman's quotes as gospel? She is as clueless as most people in football

I have the book, and I honestly don't remember that quote (although it was a few years ago that I read it, so feel free to direct me to it).
But either way, that doesn't seem to explain all the failed transfers over the years. We've been in negotiations with a number of potentially top players over the years (Alonso and Mata are the most notable examples) only for the club to fail to push them through. That doesn't signal an unwillingness on Wenger's part, but a problem in terms of negotiation.

If Wenger was not being sufficiently backed financially to do his job properly why would he not take one of the illustrious jobs he has reportedly been offered?